I use Instagram and my blog to express how I feel and to share what I learn day to day. I’m no self help guru by any means as I don’t feel anyway successful enough to brag about how gathered I am or to tell people how to live their lives. Therefore, a lot of my posting ends up being about documentation. I don’t expect it to always elicit a change in another’s life.

If you read my post yesterday, you learned that I made what felt a pretty big mistake at work yesterday. I accepted the mistake of my not being more circumspect to check that my employer actually received a booking confirmation and hoped for the best. However, when my brother reads about this and asks me, “Everything okay?” I have to stop and think. “Is everything ok?”

Because he’s my little brother, my first notion is to reassure him that “Yes. Everything is ok.”

“In the end it’s fine. It’s one of those things that if an employer cannot accept a mistake made, and in this case it seems more a computer airline glitch than anything else, who’s really at fault?”

But you know what, really as much as I may throw rationale at something – as much as saying something like this would make sense in a world full of rationale, I can’t say that I actually know that everything is fine. That is not how the world operates. So much of what people say, do, or experience is made up of impulsivity and emotions, that are separate from 100% rationale.

It’s when I think of it this way that I see comfort in the words of my brother. That despite whatever I did, or whatever might happen, he’s going to ask, “Everything ok?”

Can you pick my brother out? Ha

That’s one of the cool things about my brother. Sometimes we drive each other crazy because he has a lot more heart and emotion in how he reacts to life, while I am more analytical. As a result, we think quite differently, and because we grew up fighting and picking on one another, it’s easy to settle back into those old impressions and get frustrated with one another when we don’t see eye to eye.

But it is comforting to have someone in your family that you trust who can help you to step back from issue and wrap you in his thoughtfulness and concern, even if I’m a bit confuzzled as to how to dissect the issue from my analytical approach.

My brother can make anyone smile. He’s full of so much heart he can even get my 92 year old grandfather to act the goof for a photo. 🙂

That warmth was the perfect companion feeling to this morning when picking a booger from my nose, I drew out a booger from my nose and it was covered in a little blood. That blood reminded me that in the end I am made of simple flesh and bone. Animated with life, in a world of 7 billion, I am fragile and inconsequential, and therefore this one moment is inconsequential. Were I to be fired from a mistake like this, whether it be from a place of rationale or a place driven by emotion, what would happen? Life would not end. It would just be another curve in my road.

We should all keep that in mind when we feel that we have made a big mistake.

Are mistakes life-changing?

Yes.

But are they bad?

No.

Mistakes are just a part of life. The more important things are how you and the people around you react to them, whether it be the person affected by your mistake, or the loved ones that help you deal with them. Thank you little bro.

We are Jen and Sandy, professional nomads in New York City. We live off the urban land and document our findings along the way. We pay no rent, no utilities, and live sustainably off $100/week. Read more about us here.